Monthly Archives: January 2012

Sometime in the middle of the night the McKinleyville Press rolled off the presses at Western Web, a company owned by the pressmen who operate the machinery and sweep the floors out near the old pulp mill in Fairhaven. The papers were stacked on a pallet, ready for the morning crew.

Right now the paper is going through the ink jet machine that puts the addresses on the subscriber copies. If all g…oes well, and the mighty McK Press doesn’t jam up the machinery, the paper will be ready for delivery in about an hour.

I’ll pick them up and deliver papers to locations in Eureka. Then subscriber copies will be dropped at the Arcata Post Office for next-day delivery. I’ll wind my way through Arcata, dropping off papers at retail locations and filling newspaper racks.

Then I’ll make my way to McKinleyville, dart out to Fieldbrook, then go up to Trinidad. If all goes well, by 4 p.m. the McK Press will be available at the locations on this link. – Jack

McKinleyville Lions Club and Winter Express Committee wish to thank the community for their valuable support. We meet the 2nd and 4th Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Denny’s. Visitors welcome. For information call 839-3768.

(Advertisement)

Tonight at the Silver Lining:
Live Music this Friday, Jan 27, 7-9 pm by The Hudson Hound Dogs playing acoustic rock. Kitchen open til
11, Bar open til midnight.

If you advertise at least once a month in the McKinleyville Press you are now eligible to receive free ads on the McKinleyville Press website, blog and Facebook page. To participate, all you need to do is provide us with 40 words or less about your business/organization/etc. You can also send us a photo or logo. If you have your own website or Facebook page, provide us with a link.

We’ll take this information and post it on our website. We’ll also occasionally mention your business on our blog and Facebook page.

All you need to do is send us the information by emailing news@mckinleyvillepress.com

If you need to run a fictitious business name statement, we can help. We only charge $40. That’s a sweet deal. It doesn’t matter whether your business is in McKinleyville, Orick, Eureka, or Garberville. We can print any legal ad for Humboldt County. Click here for more information.

A five-county program assessing impacts on salmonids has named unpermitted grading as a major impact, and one county supervisor said the effects of illegal grading connected to marijuana grows are bad as those seen during the dark years of the timber industry.
Supervisor Mark Lovelace, who was one of the county’s most active environmentalists before being elected, made those comments as the results of a new regional study on habitat protection policies were presented at the Jan. 10 Board of Supervisors meeting.
Dr. Richard Harris, the researcher who coordinated the study, said unregulated and illegal grading – including the grading that enables marijuana grows – is a problem. And Lovelace described its scale as massive in Humboldt County.
“It’s phenomenal,” he said, referring to photographs of grow-related grading that he’s seen. “And it’s shocking – and it compares with the worst of the worst from some of the bad years of the timber industry.”
Lovelace suggested that some of the culprits may even fashion themselves as environmentalists. “I think some people have a tendency to think that because they want to consider themselves good stewards of the land, that alone should mean that the work they’re doing is okay,” he said.
He added, “It’s very clear that there’s a tremendous amount of earth being moved around without any engineering, without any analysis and without any consideration of the potential impacts.”
Supervisor Ryan Sundberg said the effects of restoration efforts are being offset by the illegal grading, which he called a “huge elephant in the room.” He’s also seen the photographs and is disturbed by them.
“It’s massive amounts, it’s shocking how large and how many there are,” Sundberg said. “All that stuff has to go straight into the stream, so we’re focusing on fixing stuff here and then there’s someone upriver or up the hill that’s making it for naught.”
Sundberg recommended that the county try and get funding to “define what those impacts are and try to address them.”
County Public Works Director Tom Mattson said unlike many other counties, Humboldt has a grading ordinance – which sometimes isn’t heeded. Speaking generally about the problem, Mattson said his department works with local non-profit groups like the Southern Humboldt-based Mattole Restoration Council and Eel River Watershed Improvement Group and the Redwood Community Action Agency to improve compliance.
The Five Counties Salmonid Conservation Program began in 1997 and the study described by Harris evaluates how the policies and procedures of each county have improved watershed protection.
Harris said that overall, municipal practices associated with land development, road maintenance, fish passage construction and repair and culvert work have improved since the program started.

The McKinleyville Press now has a new policy when it comes to press releases submitted by for-profit enterprises. While there will be some exceptions, we’re going to require that these companies buy advertising space to get their message out. This is a tough one for us because we’ve always tried to print everything. And some of these press releases are about companies donating money to worthy non-profit groups. However, we can’t afford to continue to subsidize the PR campaigns of private enterprise, especially those companies that don’t support us and help cover our printing cost.

To repeat: There will be exceptions.

For example, once a month we print information about all the venues participating in McKinleyville Art Night. Most of the venues are private companies. We’re giving them free advertising. But this is something that we’ll continue to do.

On the other hand, there are companies that donate money to non-profits and want us to print an announcements about their donations. From now on, what we’re going to do is require that the companies buy advertising space to make the announcement. However, the McKinleyville Press will chip in by donating a percentage of the advertising space, thereby helping the company get the announcement at a discounted rate.

Oh, and did we make it clear that there will be exceptions to these rules?

On the flip side, we have good news for regular advertisers in the McKinleyville Press. Companies that regularly advertise in the print edition will get free advertising on our website, blog and on Facebook. It’s an “advertising enhancement.” We’re still working out the details. Also, we’ll clearly mark these as advertisements so there’s no confusion between paid content and editorial content.

Here’s this week’s front page. To read the entire newspaper, buy a copy today. Click here for a list of newspaper racks and retail outlets in McKinleyville, Trinidad, Fieldbrook, Arcata and Eureka. You can subscribe by clicking here.